On September 1, 2026, Dr. Gabriela Ciocarlie was announced as Interim Director for the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), succeeding the current Dean of the School of Computing, Dr. Brendon Englot.
SIAI was launched in 2018 as a collaborative effort to advance all fields of business, engineering, technology, and humanities, all while using new domains in machine learning and artificial intelligence to further research. Today, it is Stevens’ largest institute, comprising over 150 faculty from all schools coming together to solve real problems for both public and private partnerships and social good.
Dr. Ciocarlie’s academic career spans over 20 years before joining the Stevens family as Stephen Bloom associate professor in 2025, earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Columbia University in 2010. Over the years, she further specialized in anomaly detection, cyber-physical systems security, trustworthy AI, and network and application security. She also founded SRI’s New York City research branch in cyberanalytics in 2016 and is the current Chief Technical Officer for the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII). She is recognized by IEEE as both a senior member of the organization and the laureate for the Golden Core award in 2025.
Since becoming the new interim director, Dr. Ciocarlie has been connecting with current students and faculty members to collaborate across all the domains that SIAI has to offer, including the AI Research Fellowship Program (AIRS), and is working behind the scenes to coordinate the AIRS event where students can present their work. She hopes to further expand the opportunities offered to both faculty and students, and to continue supporting current members of the institute with new setups and research opportunities to further advance the interdisciplinary field involving AI.
In her closing remarks of the interview, she shared her goals and aspirations for what she hopes to leave behind for the institution. “I hope in two years to have at least one big funded center that will enable us to work, first of all, as a community. Second of all, for building more different AI technologies that are going to be relevant to much of the population. And then to give us some continuity, so that whoever is taking over in two years, to have the center as a means to move the institute forward, so I hope we have at least one big award, that’s the biggest thing I can give forward to.”
She ended with a few words of advice to the Stevens community: “Try to find people and colleagues that share the same thing that you like to do, share the same goal, and it’s going to be a much more fun experience, in general […] These are the four years where you have so much freedom. You still have a lot of classes, but you have freedom to find your passion, and this is the only time you have fewer constraints in life, so enjoy finding what it is you like to do.”
Dr. Ciocarlie’s appointment as interim director runs through August 31, 2028.
